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cold. Eissmann hesitated. Okay, he agreed, warning that it was strictly irregular, but he would allow the lad to get dressed.

As he walked upstairs, only one idea was going through Detlef’s brain. ‘Turn off the computer! Turn it off! Shut it down! Shut it down!’ he thought. Detlef knew the police did not have his password, so if he could manage to disable the computer, there would be no evidence. He reasoned that as long as they didn’t have his password, they had nothing.

In the bedroom Eissmann’s colleague stood in front of the computer with his hands primed like a goalkeeper to protect the machine from any interference. As Detlef struggled to put on a T-shirt, he stumbled and grabbed hold of the cable leading to the plug, pulling it out of the wall socket. The humming stopped. ‘Shit, shit!’ screamed the officer, ‘the computer’s down.’ Eissmann charged into the room. ‘Right, that’s it. You’ve had it – that’s the last thing you’ll be doing for a long time.’ He dragged Detlef back downstairs into the kitchen. Eissmann thrust a piece of paper in front of him with a lot of officialese written on it, but the only thing Detlef remembers is the hand-written scrawl: ‘... suspected of forming an organised criminal syndicate.’

Despite his fury, Detective Eissmann did allow Detlef a brief exchange with his brother. Detlef told him not to worry and that everything was going to be okay. His brother said nothing, but looked at him as if he was completely bonkers. Finally, before pushing him out of the house, Eissmann asked Detlef whether he wanted to take anything with him. ‘Can you recommend the sort of thing I’ll need?’ Detlef replied, a touch perplexed. ‘This sort of thing has never happened to me before.’

As he stared out of the car window en route to the police station, his mind drifted back to the two anonymous emails he had received a couple of weeks earlier. What had he been thinking? Why hadn’t he reacted to them? Try as he might, though, Detlef was not really sure what he could have done. He was not a hardened criminal with safe-houses and a mafia network at his disposal. He was just a young and rather naive student. He barely knew what a criminal conspiracy was, let alone that he might be part of one.

Detlef was still pondering all this when the police car pulled up in front of a large white building at the end of the aptly named Asperger Street in the Stammheim district of Baden-Württemberg’s capital, Stuttgart. Had he glanced up to one of the windows on the top floor, he